DEBATEs
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How many participatory experiences exist worldwide, where citizens are engaged in debating also on resource-creation (revenues and cofounding of project proposed by citizens themselves), instead of just limiting the social dialogue to discuss expenditures?

Actually, one of the key-specificities that makes Participatory Budgeting (PBs) unique (and still innovative after almost thirty years of existence) is that it involves citizens in discussing money issues since the beginning, unlike the majority of other participatory processes, where the topics related to funding often remain hidden until the end of negotiations among the different stakeholders. 

Nevertheless, such novelty has a limit: in fact, many PBs deal only with expenditures, considering the resources to spend as acquired once for all. Such behaviour is not realistic, due to the continues cuts to public budgets, and the fragility of economic flows that can guarantee public investments. It is also a limit in consideration of the fact that all public investments require maintenance in the following years, and this risks to consume resources and make the number of future investments shrink. Thus, PBs remain squeezed between the need to keep the promises made to citizens and the risk of not having sufficient funds at the end of the year: and, so, they often have small margins of manoeuvre to grow, and do not expand the resources on which they decide to the extent that participants would dream about, as a recognition of their serious involvement.

Luckily, reality is more variated and courageous than we can imagine. So, in the last decade, several experiments were made in different countries in order that people could be involved also in a discussion on parts of revenue collection that could consolidate and strengthen the scope of the PB co-decisional space. Some of these processes aimed to discuss revenues were not explicitly part of PB, but just devices running parallel to PB. Other, were done in cities were PB was not even existing or was in its first steps, but they allowed the public budget to increase in relation to past years. Sometimes, local taxes have been the object of public discussion, while in other cases the target of public debate were development aids from abroad or new regional or national line of funding for innovative projects. Methodologies were also very different, being that some of these experiments chose to use informal spaces of discussions, other emulated PB methods, and other has been opting for the use of formalized tools of direct democracy, as referenda. Finally, there is a series of places were mechanism of co-funding and crowdfunding accompanied PB to increase the number of proposals to be funded, or cities where “collaboration pacts” between municipalities and social organisations or groups of citizens were signed, in order to take care of PB-funded proposals in the future years.

The World Atlas would like to start a debate on how PBs can be accompanied by other participatory processes, that can contribute to differentiate and enrich the source of revenues for gradually enlarging the effects and scope of participatory budgets. 
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